This page is older than it looks, see Contributors Bought a new Matsonic MS8308EP motherboard and a Duron 700 Mhz. processor (and of course a new ATX case which is annoyingly too big), and set up a new system (bought 20011215, ~$126 before tax). Intention was to install RedHat 7.2 to serve as an experimental platform for the RedHat server in the ChurchServerProject?. So far I cannot get RedHat installed.

Matsonic MS8308EP

Pretty much just like the one I bought for my son, except that it is EP which (IIUC) supports a 266 MHz. (front side) bus.

Aside: The other motherboard that I considered with a SIS 730 was a M810LMR which I think is made (or sold -- OEM'd) under several brands, including PC Chips. Somebody with this motherboard on ((Re: [newbie]; 01 Aug 2002; Graham; newbie@linux-mandrakePLEASENOSPAM.com) reported trouble installing Linux, they updated the BIOS and the problems went away.

SiS chipset, on board sound, video, network, optional LMR (?) modem:

Video is described as something like SiS 730a, but the SiS 630 driver in XFree 3.3.6 seems to work OK. IIRC, SiS has a Linux driver on their site which I should download and try (I think I tried it once on Alex's machine -- don't think the results were very promising as he is running Windows. (On board system complies with AGP V2.0), there is also a AGP4X slot to plug in an external AGP card).
Sound -- SiS (an AC97 Codec), -- may be working -- need to plug in speakers and see.

Network -- SiS 950??, not used, as I use coax. Got a used 3Com 3C590 (?) for $8 and use it. Need to do some more experimenting -- there is something odd -- I can access the network except for IP 192.168.0.1 (LivingRoom?) -- all other stations fine, and those stations can still access the LivingRoom? computer. (This problem now gone, don't recall how I relsolved it.)

Plug in modem -- not bought

Other:

256 MB Ram (PC133, module bought a year ago but could not use in my existing motherboards) (Since upgraded to 512 MB)

3Com 3c590 pci network card

Maxtor 8.1 GB Hard drive (bought as temporary replacement for Leslie when her disk died -- had a Windows (95) image on it, now erased -- but worked OK when first installed -- went through a lot of "found new hardware" cycles until I installed the drivers).

Using my existing mouse and keyboard through an "AT" style manual switch. Using com1 for mouse instead of PS/2 (tried an adapter, but didn't work -- looks like I now have two such adapters). PS/2 keyboard, adapted to AT to go through switch and then back to PS/2 at computer seems to work fine.

MEMORY (on p.11)
"For this mainboard, you must use 168-pin, 3.3V unbuffered PC100 or PC133 SDRAM memory modules. You can install any size memory module from 32 MB up to 512MB, so the maximum memory size is 2 x 512MB = 1GB."

Linux installations

MandrakeFreq 7.2

Installed and works fine (except that I should not test the video during install -- it hangs afterward -- I did an update to complete the installation without testing X), fast because there is far less swapping.

When first installed and run, Mandrake quickly used a lot of memory (~170 MB), and then starting X and KDE got me uncomfortably close to swapping. After allowing the system to stabilize and reboot, system starts out closer to ~120 MB, but seems to use a lot overnight (up to 204 MB --the 4:00 AM locate update?).

Opening additional windows with Konqueror is fast after the initial load -- want to watch and see what happens when it starts swapping.

My opinion is that the speed increase is primarily due to swapping, only minorly due to the increase in processor speed (compared to 7.2 on System8).

Enabled a lot more services, including Samba, and this may be why cups (and printing to my Canon BJC-3000 on a Windows machine) finally worked.

Unfortunately, the fonts in konqueror are very small. I will start a new page, SetupMandrake72 to make notes of what I have to change to get the fonts and so forth set up better. (Clearly, I did this before, I just don't remember which hoops I had to jump through last time to get better (or larger) fonts.)

Mandrake 8.0

Didn't make a sincere effort to install -- my copies of the CDs are not bootable.

Mandrake Troktopal 3

(Is that a beta for 8.1 or 8.0??) -- managed to install OK, using XFree 3.3.6 (IIRC), and, again, without testing the video.

Enabled many servers, may have contributed to a higher use of memory (forget how much, but significantly more than MandrakeFreq 7.2).

Stopped using it (after only a few hours trial) because it seemed to periodically "spawn" a bunch of Apache (httpd) processes that then became zombies, and then disappeared. I would see like 22 or 28 zombies, then 1 or 2, then they'd be gone, then I'd see 22 or 28 again.

Also, I saw the "dreaded" bookkeeping task (I don't remember what that was), and decided I just would rather not fool with it -- I'll move my TWiki to this box and then experiment with RedHat 7.2 on my old Linux server box (system8).

Another problem was that the fonts look really small and ugly, both in konqueror and kedit.

RedHat 7.2

Could not successfully install. Had a little trouble getting the install started -- forget what the problem was and how I fixed it, but then, during package loading, I always got an error (3 or 4 tries). Forgot the error message, oops, here it is (approximately -- this is from the sequence of messages I saw on the screen after the install stopped -- it never asks for the second disk):

Mandrake 8.1

Install failed the first time (forg0t the problems). On that install I left the existing (Reiser) partitions in place. On the next try, I converted most partitions (except /boot -- it is ext2) to jfs. Then the installation worked (at least generally -- I have a problem in that I can't get to the virtual terminals, printing doesn't work, and I haven't tested sound as it typically does not work -- will test it sometime just for kicks).

Mandrake 8.2

Installed quite well (IIRC -- I'm writing this a month or two after the fact). Virtual terminals work, printing works sometimes (recently I tried to print a web page (not TWiki) -- it printed the top "header" but nothing else), and I still haven't bothered to even try sound.

Konqueror is a problem though, especially when editing TWiki -- lines would not wrap within the width of the window (I explained this better somewere on twiki.org, on one of the browser pages).

Tried Mozilla, Netscape 6 (I think), and the GNOME browser (Galeon?). Galeon had a few problems and I didn't like it for some reason.

I'm using Mozilla 0.9.8 and learning to like the tab feature a lot. During editing, the cursor sometimes gets very lost, and, for example, pastes go to the wrong place. BTW, cut and paste behaves like Windows (instead of like Linux) which is very nice.

One other (major) problem -- even though I try to start a new instance of Mozilla for each "group" of pages I want to read (and then load pages into tabs), the one time I had Mozilla crash, it took down all instances of Mozilla (at least some of them I had started as what I thought were separate instances. (Press and type Mozilla.)

Mandrake 9.0

IIRC, I didn't run Mandrake 8.2 very long, installed Mandrake 9.0 when it became available.

Knoppix 3.2

Then, around April, 2003, I installed Mandrake 9.1 on System12 and installed Knoppix 3.2 on this system.

Knoppix installed everything in one big / partition. I want to make use of at least some of the other partitions on that drive.

less /proc/partitions gives a good report of all mounted and unmounted partitions. (I believe the report is in terms of 1024 byte blocks.)

Knoppix after Reboot

I haven't had to reboot Knoppix since the install until recently. Afterwards, I did have to reboot, and found that I could not connect to the network, because I had not made some of the setup commands permanent.